LOAD BALANCING TO ADJUST FOR PROXIMITY IN SOME NETWORK TOPOLOGIES

Each job scheduler in large decentralized load balancing systems gener ally must consider whether it is advantageous to offload jobs to remot e computation servers when the local load is too high. Although proces sing power may appear to be available at a very distant server, two pr oblems arise due to the transmission delay between the scheduler and s erver. Predictably, the response time of the job is adversely affected as the job spends valuable time in transit, but a more subtle problem involves the value, or reliability, of the state information regardin g job queues. The longer the delay between scheduler and server, the l ess a scheduler should value the state information of the server (give n that the state changes over time). We examine the performance of sch edulers in topologies with different average proximity and show a prob abilistic algorithm that allows schedulers to dynamically form efficie nt clusters in the network.